The first book I remember (excepting several Dickens novels, flotsam of
an abandoned attic library) is a cheap, ill-favored, coarsely printed
volume of “Bill” Nye’s sketches, elegantly entitled _Baled Hay_. I
discovered it in a corner of the village postoffice, where there were
a couple of shelves of nondescript books--cheap in every sense: in
price, binding and contents--which served as the sole local excuse for
a bookstore. This copy of “Bill” Nye is the link between my boyish and
my mature reading. Nye is the one author whom I enjoy to this day in
precisely the same spirit and to the same degree that I enjoyed him as
a boy. This fact indicates his limitation and his peculiar appeal. He
is limited to a crude, obvious, undeveloped humor; and his appeal is
to the undiscriminating childlike mirth in a man. He is juvenile in
essence, in subject, in manner. I might say that “Bill” Nye was funny
to me in the same way that almost any trifling break in the monotony of
the schoolroom was funny--a suddenly overturned chair, a spilled bottle
of ink, or an egregious blunder in recitation.
Perhaps this is not an adequate explanation. It is not every schoolboy
that responds to the boisterous fun of “Bill” Nye. They prefer, as in
later life, something with plenty of action--_Peck’s Bad Boy_, for
example or the misadventures of Mr. Bowser (wasn’t this the name?).
Yet I say it is to the boy in man, to the uncouth comic spirit that
lurks in every age of man, that “Bill” Nye appeals. One enjoys him
in the mood of a boy released from school, or, better still, in the
spirit of spring-time truancy. What a book like _Treasure Island_ is to
the sense of adventure, what fairy tales are to the sense of wonder,
“Bill” Nye is to the sense of humor. The enjoyment of “Bill” Nye is not
found in the intellectual glow of satire, in the keen smile of wit, in
the subtle thrill of epigram or paradox, but in the loud laughter of
the commonest of comic things. For this reason I find in him a speedy
and unfailing escape from melancholy thoughts. No matter how jaded
one’s spirits, how deeply plunged in gloom, Nye’s grimacing, cavorting
absurdities will surely produce the usual number of laughs. There is
not demanded any delicate receptive mood, any particular conjunction of
happy spirits. He is as gratuitously and independently ludicrous and
laughable as a circus clown.
One could not call “Bill” Nye subtle--heavens! no--but his humor is
often artificial, in that it depends not absolutely upon incidents
that in themselves are humorous, but upon an odd, perverse, irrational
use of words. He tells somewhere of a would-be author, who fondly
anticipated, when his work should be finished, a crowd of publishers
“trampling the daisies” in the front yard. After wearily writing
“Finis,” he looked out of the window and was “surprised by the abrupt
and pronounced manner in which they were not there.” This is absurd
enough, in all conscience; and because it is absurd--unexpectedly
and unreasonably absurd--I, for one, find it laughable. And who can
resist a chuckle at this sort of expression: “the low rumble of the
throbbing Boston brain dimly heard in the distance”? Writing of
taxidermy, on which he gravely pretends to be an authority, he refers
to “upholstered beasts.” Again, we have this phrase: “the still, white
features of a soup-bone that has outlived its usefulness.” And this:
“the death-rattle of a bathtub.” He declares that he is willing to “sit
up all night to doubt” the theory of eternal damnation. Writing of the
stern and hidebound Puritans who settled on the “stern and rockbound”
coast of New England, he defines religious freedom as “the art of
giving intolerance a little more room.” I am grateful for every blow,
however light, at Puritanism and intolerance. Whether it be Voltaire or
“Bill” Nye (a sufficiently grotesque comparison!) there is relish in
the ironic or humorous view of the atrabilious Cotton Mathers of this
world. I quote another of Nye’s amusing references to the Puritans:
“Among the Puritans there were several who had enlarged consciences,
and who desired to take in extra work for others who had no consciences
and were busy in the fields.” The dreary economic background
that perhaps had much to do with the narrowness of outlook that
distinguished the Puritans is succinctly described by Nye: “The people
were kept busy digging clams to sustain life in order to raise Indian
corn enough to give them sufficient strength to pull clams enough the
following winter to get them through till the next corn crop should
give them strength to dig for clams again.” There is shrewdness, too,
in this observation on the Civil War: “Most great wars are arranged by
people who stay at home and sell groceries to the widow and orphan and
old maids at one hundred per cent advance.”
The best of “Bill” Nye, to my notion, are his humorous historical
sketches--pseudo-historical, indeed, but frequently affording glimpses
of the truth that are not to be found in the sober accepted chronicles.
The quality of this phase of his humor is, I think, simply explained.
It consists of an irreverence that is, at bottom, touched with
skepticism. Hero-worship, if it is a more or less universal instinct of
human nature, is a rather stiff and uncomfortable and trying exercise.
It is, too, an overestimated and overworked instinct, that has been too
persistently and prodigiously appealed to in popular history. These
“steel engravings,” plaster saints and wooden models of heroism are
(certainly at times) an unlovable and tiresome company.
One finds a wholesome, hearty reaction from this hero-worship in “Bill”
Nye’s jolly brand of history. He goes guffawing down the Hall of
Fame, swatting blithely the sedate statues of the brave and good and
mighty and learned. Here he is, indeed, a very schoolboy, throwing his
history-book aside, and shooting paper wads at the immobile, insensibly
decorous figures of Columbus and Washington and Ben Franklin and the
rest. In spite of oneself, one laughs even at one’s favorite hero, and,
with seeming inconsequence, regards this hero thereafter in a more
human and favorable light. There is relief, there is relaxation--a
healthful unbending of the faculties--in these droll, preposterous,
utterly irrelevant comments. We see Columbus suffering from a period
of geographical depression--nothing to discover--and being recommended
to Queen Isabella as a capable man in his trade, who “is willing to
let his work show for itself”; Washington as a man equally efficient
in prayer and profanity, swearing with a vigor that would “break up
the ice in the Delaware a week earlier than usual”; Ben Franklin as
foreman, “cussing” the rival paper and yelling for more copy; Daniel
Webster as “a good off-hand speaker,” who “wore the largest hat of any
man then in Congress”; Noah Webster, he of the immortal dictionary, as
the man who “had the best command of language of any American author
prior to our day.”
Opinions may well differ regarding the humor of this sort of
thing--certainly it is not profound nor subtle nor artistic humor,
being more or less trifling horseplay indeed--but there is laughter in
it nevertheless and it is an escape from that seriousness which often
weighs too heavily on the spirit. It is good to laugh, whatever the
occasion; and one who has a robust and expansive sense of humor will
not fail to laugh occasionally with “Bill” Nye.
One can say, although it goes without saying, that Nye is not of the
company of the world’s great humorists. One would not mention him in
the same breath with Sterne, or Rabelais, or Moliere, or Dick Steele,
or Oscar Wilde, or our own Mark Twain. The humor of Nye is the humor
of what Nye himself called “the new and crass civilization” of his
day. It is not the humor of the highest culture. It is a humor that
is barely commentary--a mere pointing out of absurdities--rather than
deliberately or delicately creative. “Bill” Nye is superficial; he is
sophomoric; he is often somnolent; but he is funny, and indeed this
word defines him exactly. He is funny rather than truly humorous in
the finer sense of the word. In the latter part of the nineteenth
century, “Bill” Nye grew up with the Western American frontier country,
and in the midst of these raw beginnings of a new and strange and
boisterously immature society, full of the most violent contrasts, he
exercised his peculiar and contemporaneous humor. A very little of
“Bill” Nye will suffice for the general reader. His kind of humor has
its natural limits and, writing as a journalist, much of what he wrote
is labored and dull. This little book contains some of the best and
most characteristic of his sketches; and if it cannot quite be said
that this is all of him that is worth-while or enjoyable, at least it
represents the extent to which he may be read agreeably and profitably
by one who desires no more than a bowing acquaintance with him; it is,
truth to tell, an accurate measure of the man’s importance.